The sight, sound, and motion of television creates a powerful branding experience that cannot be replicated with a digital display ad. That said, the targeting and measurement capabilities in OLV increase the effectiveness and accountability of advertising. The answer is not to choose one or the other; it's combining the best capabilities of both TV and OLV into one holistic approach.

BEST PRACTICES SERIES

As the preferred method of human communication has evolved from letters, telephones, and televisions to email, text, and chat, improvements in AI have kept pace and made it ready to partner with corporate marketing in the digital age. Marketers have done well by pairing technological advancements with the best AI tools—such as personalization based on browsing history. This trend should continue with the new era of global chatbots. When companies move toward marketing by chat, they need to use this channel wisely or risk damaging their customer relationships. As technology advances, user expectations rise.

Gone are the days when the Yellow Pages were delivered to every house, and print advertising is on the decline. Companies need to move beyond traditional methods and modify their marketing channels accordingly. Chatbots are a perfect match for targeted, AI-based marketing, and we already know personalized advertising can be very effective. I admit to making online purchases of items suggested to me based on an item I bought earlier. And who wouldn’t want to try a new book by a favorite author? But as technology helps companies market smarter, there are equally smart digital tools and applications available to discerning end users. A careful approach with your intelligent chatbot will avoid alienating customers, and it could increase satisfaction with existing customers if done well.

What’s In It for the Customer?

Rules and regulations in some countries allow people to end all texts or chats from a company with a single text response, such as STOP. In order to avoid annoying your customers, who might then unsubscribe, companies need to limit the number of marketing texts. The more sophisticated extension, though, is to make chatbot communications intelligent enough to inspire the consumer to want more. A chatbot that reminds you that a bill is due, an appointment is scheduled, or your favorite shampoo just went on sale is deemed valuable and worth keeping around.

Don’t Overdo It

Push marketing should be used cautiously and only when AI tells you it makes sense. There are applications available in some countries that are designed to block push marketing messages, so a chatbot should only push with some intelligent reason, such as alerting you to a subscription that’s expiring. It should also not get something basic wrong. A chatbot pushing dog food to a cat owner or children’s wear to a young college graduate will be silenced quickly. If a customer is not responding directly to a chat, slow the message rate down or even allow him or her to take control of the frequency or topics. Companies must resist the temptation to oversaturate or risk the inevitable consequence of being unfriended.

Mind the Screen Real Estate

Many users chat on a mobile phone—or other small screens—and have limited attention, time, space, and patience. Chatbot messages that are brief and to the point will be more effective than long-winded ones. Readability and usability are also key. Your chatbot should be smart enough to include helpful, direct links and allow for quick, abbreviated responses to make it as easy as possible to respond to. Chatbots are visual communicators, so line breaks and careful quality assurance of the written messages are needed to maintain a professional and respected brand.

Localize or Don’t Bother

Going global requires chatting with customers in their language of choice. AI can help a good chatbot know what language to use, but it should also be sure to chat in the right dialect. Don’t speak Canadian French to a European French speaker, and don’t assume all Spanish or English speakers chat in the same language. Be sure you are using the correct writing system for the customer’s locale (such as Traditional Chinese or Simplified Chinese). If your AI is confident that a customer is young and tech savvy, your chatbot can assume some sophistication—but my teenagers tell me that over-abbreviating or appearing to try too hard to be hip can backfire. If you’re not sure what language to chat with, it’s better to ask than to assume and be wrong.

Good AI Requires a Good Strategy

Using chatbots to market is a no-brainer in this age of texting and chatting, and AI can add the wow factor to go with it. But companies need to resist the temptation to over-push and must proceed with caution and good AI.

Related Articles

This year's EContent 100 list includes companies that are changing with the times and some that are leading the charge. Find out which 100 companies made this year's list of companies that Matter Most in the Digital Content Industry.

The assumption that organizations would buy a single-vendor DXP based on the number of parts within said solution is at odds with what our analysts and consultants were seeing across companies of all sizes and industry sectors. We decided that it was time for voice-of-the-buyer, fact-based insight that would separate DXP myths from reality.

Digital experience (DX) covers a lot of territory—so much so that discussions about DX technology often result in a consensus that collapses as projects surface incompatible expectations. Customer experience had a similar problem, getting way out of hand with expectations of omnichannel, including brick-and-mortar stores. If you've been around enterprise software for a while, you'll be familiar with software category labels outgrowing their britches and acting like they can do anything, if you'll forgive the anthropomorphizing.

In the world of content, automation is having an effect on things such as image, speech, and text processing—and even the creation of written content. In the translation and localization sector, we're seeing automation driven by AI (such as neural machine translation) and by old-fashioned human ingenuity. Automation is used as a competitive advantage by translation companies since in most cases, it results in cost-savings and time-savings for their clients.

According to a worldwide survey from Google and Statista, video consumption is popular, ranging from a consumer consumption high of 95% in Saudi Arabia to a low of 54% in South Africa. In the U.S., 85% of internet users say they watch online video. That popularity has spurred the use of video not only for information and entertainment, but also for marketing.